A couple of weeks ago, I pulled a card from a Chakra Insight Oracle deck by Caryn Sangster. The question I asked before drawing it was, “What should I focus on as I move forward through this period of my life?”
The card read, Honesty.
In the past three months, I’ve been pulling more cards than I would ever have imagined I’d do in a lifetime; and all answers have pointed in the same direction: expression, communication, truth.
I’ve taken their guidance as reminders to stay focused on writing. On speaking from the heart. On being okay with telling my stories. On being okay with me being me and telling you who I am (or at least who I think I am, right now, in this moment of writing).
If you’d asked me a year ago if I’d ever be pulling guidance cards from any deck I’d have scoffed. There was a time when many ideas, beliefs and practices would never have crossed my mind.
Once upon a time, yoga, meditation, and hypnosis seemed weird to me. Until recently, the ideas of astral travel and energy healing lay far outside my comfort zone.
Like many people, I come to things slowly.
But, as life has shown me, there’s no such thing as one all encompassing, absolute TRUTH—about anything. Only layers of subtle and ever-changing micro-truths. And, if we dive deep, we find out there’s no one way to tell our stories or to make sense of who we are.
When I resist the idea of my life’s fluidity, I get tangled up in my own insistence that things should be this way or that way. That I should be this way or that way. And I risk drowning in self-analysis and unhealthy rumination.
When I stop fighting, when I open my mind to various ways of moving through the layers of small truths, the journey becomes gentler. I rise to the surface. I discover meaning in the seeming chaos of my life and the seeming mystery of me.
In her book The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life that Matters, author, philosopher and psychologist Emily Esfahani Smith explains that living a meaningful life is more rewarding than pursuing happiness. She posits that we create meaning in our lives in four ways: by cultivating a sense of belonging, finding our purpose, telling our life stories, and experiencing moments of transcendence.
In the chapter which deals with storytelling, she writes: “We are all storytellers — all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an ‘act of creation’ of the ‘composition of our lives.’”
“Yet unlike most stories we’ve heard,” she continues, “our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it.”
She explains that, “By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.”
In the same chapter, Esfahani Smith discusses the work of Northwestern University psychologist Dan P. McAdams, an expert on narrative identity.
According to McAdams, “narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself — your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured.”
Furthermore, our personal myths are made up of what McAdams calls ‘narrative choices.’ We pick and choose what to tell and how to tell it, depending on the experiences we’re trying to make sense of. Furthermore, our interpretation of similar events might differ depending on who we are.
For one person, for example, a childhood experience like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water by a parent might explain his sense of himself today as a hardy entrepreneur who learns by taking risks. For another, that experience might explain why he hates boats and does not trust authority figures. A third might leave the experience out of his story altogether, deeming it unimportant.
Esfahani Smith also writes that McAdams has found that “people who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion and agency. These stories allow individuals to craft a positive identity: they are in control of their lives, they are loved, they are progressing through life and whatever obstacles they have encountered have been redeemed by good outcomes.”
I believe that, overall, I am an optimistic person. I may get knocked down, but I always get back up. I now know that storytelling, as a means of making sense of my life, is at the core of this optimism. For as long as I can remember, I’ve constantly revised and edited my personal myth until I’ve found that silver lining — that lifeline that pulled me out of the frigid waters of incoherence and despair and back to the warm shores of meaning and hope.
I must admit that I’m currently struggling, though. In the past two months, I’ve moved, almost daily (and sometimes even hourly), between despair and hope, incoherence and meaning. I’m living in what I can only think of as a transition period — a period of great shifting and confusion, but one that (I am certain) will lead me to a fuller understanding of my self and my role in this world.
I am, after all, 55 years old. This is not the first time I’ve had to tread water — I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.
It’s just that I thought I was done with this kind of uncertainty.
I thought I had my storyline figured out.
You see, I fell in love.
I didn’t mean to, but I did.
I fell in love after that part of me — the loving part — that believing-I-could-love-like-that-again part had all but disappeared for almost 15 years.
And it wasn’t a sudden falling. It was gradual and slow. And it felt like coming home.
And if all this sounds like the perfect beginning of the perfect love story, I must caution you that it’s not, because I fell in love with a woman who cannot love me back because she’s heterosexual.
But there’s more to it than that.
There’s the fact that 16 years ago, I left the most mentally abusive relationship of my life, and that after the leaving (I now believe) my unconscious mind froze my heart and built a wall of ice around it for protection.
There’s also the fact that, between then and now, a close friend died.
I began suffering from severe anxiety and insomnia.
I realized there was something terribly wrong with my mother before it was clear she’d suffered enough micro strokes to cause dementia and rob me of my life-long confidant and closest friend.
My dad was diagnosed with cancer and my daughter was raped.
And, at some point, I began drinking too much alcohol and smoking too many cigarettes.
There’s more to it because, in all that time, I was still somewhat okay. I was working through it all and I wasn’t unhappy because I was taking care of everyone and my life was filled with purpose.
In that time, I almost never thought about romantic love and I was thrilled because I believed I had finally grown out of all that “nonsense.”
In that time, my 71-year-old mother and I also learned to kayak and spent five wonderful summers exploring a lake that had been, for more than 30 years, virtually inaccessible to us.
And in that horrible/wonderful time, I experienced the ultimate moment of transcendence as I witnessed my first granddaughter’s birth.
And, I quit drinking and smoking.
And, I began studying the unconscious mind and became a consulting hypnotist.
And, I started a business while still teaching full-time.
In short, I led a very full life.
And, somewhere in that time, without me noticing, the protective wall of ice melted away and my heart began to thaw.
In the stories we live, Dan P. McAdams says, “All life stories include significant conflicts, unresolved issues, problems to be solved, and periods of great stress.” He explains that by exploring present problems we learn about issues we need to resolve in order to move forward with our personal myth-making.
Romantic love is obviously an unresolved issue in my life. I now know I must go back before going forward—I must, perhaps, acknowledge just how deeply I am wounded—and all the while I must keep my heart warm and beating.
After all, it is just newly reborn and pure again.
And I must be patient. My story does not currently have an ending. I’m floundering somewhere in the middle.
The guidance cards I’ve been pulling are lifelines that keep me from being swept downstream. They tell me that my stories must be told. That their expression is deeply linked to my emotional well-being and (I hope) to the emotional well-being of others.
I must remember to stop fighting, to open my mind to new ways of moving through the layers of truths, to allow myself to gently rise to the surface, and to trust the process of my own personal myth-making.
I wrote this piece in 2020, but for some reason never published it. It is very closely linked to We Are. Here. and I feel it is still relevant, so I’ve decided to share it now. After all, I am still in the middle of my story. Just as we all are.
Thank you for reading. ❤️
By the way, I do not use affiliate links.
Not able to comment? Send me note Here.
Monique Chénier 
That was incredibly powerful. Captured me from the start and swelled from there like a tidal wave. Thank you for sharing your truth and your vulnerability. It’s always amazing how much changes, and how much doesn’t change, in 5 years.
LikeLiked by 1 person